


Mimosa Boy

by neville



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Guitars, M/M, Music, Summer, Summer Love, Summer Vacation, cedric is a rich boy, fred and george are working for his family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 10:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13972824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neville/pseuds/neville
Summary: Cedric Diggory is a precocious multilingual classical guitar player staying in his family's French country home for the holidays, where country-hopping twins Fred and George are employed for the summer. Cedric expects nothing, only to find that George happens to be a lot more interesting than he'd ever thought.





	Mimosa Boy

Summers in the European countryside are the summers George thinks he finds the most beautiful, the kind of summers that blaze sunshine and rain warm rain that he wants to run under, and the Diggory country house is somewhere he’s more than happy to spend his July and August: the defining feature of their yard is a massive swimming pool that he’s allowed to use every now and then when he’s not busy and it’s surrounded by well-placed sun loungers and chairs where the family rest and read books under the shade of their straw hats, and on the other side of the house is a path that leads out and along by a stream that’s just shallow enough to paddle in with enough of a rocky steep that George can sit by it and watch the clouds against the bleached blue sky. 

“Do you know how to make a mimosa?” Cedric asks, and George quirks his eyebrows in response.

“Didn’t know you were a middle-aged mother, Cedric,” he says, straightening up. “But I sure do. Can’t work at a rich person’s holiday home if you can’t make rich people drinks, can you?”

Cedric snorts good-naturedly. “I’ll pour that mimosa over your head if you keep talking like that. We don’t pay you to talk shit.” He leans against the kitchen counter as George tracks down an appropriate glass, trailed up the side by an intricate pattern; even the crockery in the house is beyond his dream expenditure.

“I don’t think  _ you _ pay me anything, Cedric,” George hums as he pours, masterfully as a bartender (his job by the beach for his three months in Jamaica just before this). “You know, this is good weather for a G&T.”

“Pour yourself some and come sit out with me, then,” Cedric answers, running a hand through his hair: it’s brown and curly and cliché, and George grins as he opens the drinks cabinet, an impressively-stocked masterwork of potential alcoholism. “Could use the company.”

“I could use the excuse to not work,” George replies, dismissing Cedric with a wave of his hand to appear outside just some moments later with their drinks; Cedric has already popped open his button-down and located a pair of sunglasses, sprawled out. “God, you rich people.”

“What?” Cedric laughs, peering over his sunglasses at George. “Do poor people not sunbathe?”

“You’re just so  _ expectant _ ,” George says, shaking his head as he passes Cedric his mimosa; George himself sits with his feet dipped in the pool, T-shirt covering his already wildly freckled skin. Cedric can tan, but George just burns. “That’s the good thing about being poor. You expect nothing, so everything’s a great surprise. Like getting to stay somewhere with a pool. A pool! And where I can  _ drink  _ by the pool! Christ, I’m living in luxury.” 

“You really consider this luxury?”

“Closest thing I’ve ever had to it.” 

Cedric laughs - not mockingly, but softly, startled by George’s openness. “Hold on a minute, then. Let me up that luxury scale for you, Georgie.” He gets up, sidling over to the wall where just one of his many guitars rests, a flower sketched in dark pen on the headstock, and he picks it up, taking a seat on the other side of the pool from George, legs crossed. “What do you want to hear?” 

“I don’t know. Do you know The Clash?”

“Very funny.” 

“Thanks. People say I’m good at being funny. But play whatever you want; I don’t really know anything.” 

Cedric nods, taking a few moments before setting his hands to the string, picking and sliding as easily as if he had been born with the mastery, an ease to the flow with which he plays. George has never been one for classical music, but Cedric is entrancing, playing it with a practised flamboyance, a confident smirk playing at the corner of his lips as he lifts his head to look up at George. 

“Do you feel rich yet?” he asks. 

“In the lap of luxury,” George says. 

* * *

“Was ‘flirting’ in your job description? Because I’m sad it wasn’t in mine.” Fred looks up from the piles of T-shirts he’s folding and winks at George, who rolls his eyes in response, raising a subtle finger to his twin.

“I’m not flirting with him. I poured him a mimosa.”

“My God, that’s practically a marriage proposal! Between that and the sensual guitar playing, you two are practically  _ explicit _ ,” Fred gasps, laughing as George flings a pair of shorts at his head. “What? Come on, he likes you! Wouldn’t it be fun, to have a rich boyfriend while we’re here? Imagine the stories you could tell: drinking mimosas together, splashing at each other in the swimming pool, kissing under the European sun…” 

“Yeah, sure,” George says, rolling his eyes. “In your dreams. The world isn’t like airport romance novels.”

“I wish it were,” Fred says sadly. “It’d be so much easier to pick up a girl.” 

* * *

George borrows Cedric’s sister’s bike when he rides, a splash of pink against his bright-coloured clothes as he pedals along beside Cedric, the trees rushing alongside them as they follow the path of the rushing water. The heat beats down on his reddened back, bringing out the browns and oranges of his freckles where they peek out at his collar.

George was brought up near the English countryside, but he doesn’t love it anywhere as much as he loves France: England’s trees are heavy and weigh the rain that pours down their leaves and they mar out the sun when they get it, but the plants and thickets of France are light and breezy and the sun reflects off their leaves in a bright summer mirror. He breathes the clear air and feels the warmth of the true sunshine, letting his wheels bump across the stones on the path until he and Cedric pull into the riverbank, whereupon George unloads the picnic bag he brought, laying down a check blanket on the grass and covering it in a neat spread of sandwiches, juices, and small cakes that Fred had gotten up early to make them.

Cedric even has his guitar with him, though whether for playing or for decoration, George can’t tell.

“George,” he says softly, looking over. “Have you ever read  _ Maurice _ ?”

“Haven’t read a book since I left school, and I barely even read then,” George shrugs. “I’ve tried, but everything just looks boring.”

“You should read,” Cedric says, and shifts to lie on his side, taking a cheese and ham sandwich and setting into it. “And you ought to read  _ Maurice _ . I have a spare copy; I bought it because mine’s coming apart now, but I guess I’d rather have the book I’ve loved than the one I bought for convenience.” 

George shrugs. “I like listening to my Walkman.” 

“What do you like? The Clash?”

“I like David Bowie. He made being ginger almost acceptable with that Ziggy Stardust - but I think  _ Heroes  _ is my favourite album. It’s the sound of being sixteen, to me. You know?”

“That sounds a bit more normal. Debussy was  _ my _ sound of sixteen. You should play me some Bowie sometime. Do you have your Walkman?”

“Your lucky day, Cedric,” George laughs, retrieving it from his bag, earphones and all. “I brought my good bag. You’re about to enter the world of  _ non-classical music _ . Except this is  _ Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars _ , not  _ Heroes _ .”

“Colour me thrilled,” Cedric replies, shuffling in to take an earphone as George rolls closer to him so that they’re lying on opposite ends of the blanket, wires connecting them to each other and to David Bowie as they eat, fingers clawing over the other’s at their food until it’s gone and they’re just there, staring at each other and listening to the chronicles of a man beyond.  

George reaches his hand out and closes it over Cedric’s and their eyes meet and Bowie sings “ _ oh no love, you’re not alone _ ”. 

“George,” Cedric mumbles, “why couldn’t you have come into my life earlier?”

* * *

Cedric had taken no notice when George arrived, just another summer boy hired to clean; he’d been curious at the arrival of twins, but had paid them little heed, instead focusing on his guitar, reading, and relaxing by the pool.

George had hit him all at once and with full force, all full of wit and laughter and British sarcasm and everything like the best of home, and now George is standing in his bedroom and Cedric can’t imagine not ever being invested in him. George is all personality and like a drug; the weeks he’s been here have been potent.

And George has been equally interested, because how couldn’t he be? Cedric is rich, precocious, certainly oblivious to George’s background; but he’s fascinating in that precociousness and intelligence, and hell, George could listen to him play all day, or trace his finger along the spines on Cedric’s bookcase and memorise the titles. He’s never considered liking anyone before, least of all an entitled rich boy with a pool who drinks mimosas; but that’s perhaps what’s so endearing. George has never met anyone like Cedric before, and Cedric anyone like George.

George doesn’t get nervous, but he is now. Cedric is close enough to touch, and his breath rattles too, and maybe they could stand there all night like that, anxious in the newness of their feelings.

“Maybe we should kiss,” George whispers with a chuckle. Cedric looks back at him.

“Maybe we should,” he says. “So kiss me. I’m hiring you, right?”

George laughs. “You’re a dick,” he says, and knots his fingers behind Cedric’s neck. “Do your parents know they’re paying someone who’s shirking to make out with their son?”

“It’s  _ interpersonal development _ ,” Cedric argues, and parts his lips because George is kissing him now, surprisingly still in contrast to his usual restlessness. George is slow, taking in Cedric like a wonder of the world, and it’s Cedric who pushes back to kiss more, cuing George to shift away for a moment, looking away. “George?”

“Oh,” George mumbles into the air. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he says, and leaves the room, but when Cedric hurries down to George’s room, he’s gone. 

* * *

Fred is no guru of his brother and wonders, in fact, what he’s done when Cedric comes down for breakfast asking for him. The other house guests, cousins and an aunt, glance at him, but Cedric is insistent.

“He’s out in town picking me up some ingredients,” Fred says when grilled, raising his hands and feigning surrender, giving Cedric a sympathetic pat on the back. “He’s not good with his feelings, you know. He just needs to go puzzle it over for a bit - he’s never been with anyone before. You’re a surprise.”

George doesn’t return for the better part of the day, and Cedric listlessly wanders in waiting: he reaches down to pick up a fallen book and finds that his  _ Maurice  _ is gone. He takes the opportunity for an exchange and walks into George’s room, careful like it’s a sanctuary: a sanctuary of mess, that is, uncoordinated and a snapshot of chaos, so much so that it takes him a moment to find George’s orderly cassettes in his suitcase. His Walkman is away with him, of course, but Cedric has a cassette player, and into it he presses  _ Heroes _ .

George seems to exist within the music as a presence when Cedric listens, jotting down the eponymous song’s chords with curiosity.

George returns just before evening with heavy bags, and whilst Fred muses by the pool, he finds Cedric with ease in his room and shuts the door behind him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve never felt so much before. Usually I just - you know, go from place to place, and live on the surface, but… I kissed you.”

“I don’t know anything more than you do. Up til now, I’ve impressed everybody but nobody’s impressed me back.” Cedric takes a seat on his bed, his fingers closing over George’s cassette. “I listened to more Bowie.”

“Yeah? Did you like it?”

“It sounds like being nineteen,” Cedric says. George looks back at him, a smile playing on his lips, and kisses him.

* * *

George is no slacker and works on, keeping the house impossibly well-maintained and ignoring Cedric’s teasing attempts to distract him to the point that Cedric eventually gives up and waits for George’s timetable to fit him in. George never shows up at the same time twice, but he’s consistent in the fact that he  _ shows up _ , grinning like a Cheshire cat in the doorway.

Cedric spends the better part of his time without George with his guitar instead. He’s never been much of a composer, but he knows the theory and tries bitterly, spending an entire day trying to riff off of  _ Heroes  _ with absolutely no success, and is huffy when George finally arrives, surprised to see his lost  _ Maurice  _ in George’s hands.

“ _ I am unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort _ ,” George quotes dramatically, tossing it back to Cedric. “It was good. I liked it.”

“Will you be a convert to classic gay literature, George?”

“Sadly, I think not, Cedric. Once was perhaps enough. Besides, I’ve already read the one happy ending. The rest would be disappointing.”

“George?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know.”

George laughs. “Me neither.”

“I tried to write you a song. I’ve been trying for days, but I think I’m destined just to play all the greats who came before me.” Cedric flops back on the bed and George joins him, hand to hand, backs to sheets. “Where did all the classical composers go?”

“Pop music was invented,” George says sagely. “There are people with amazing classical knowledge out there. They’re just in Queen.”

“Queen?”

“Rock band.”

“Ah.” Cedric runs his thumb over George’s rough knuckles, his hands course with work and dried out from washing in comparison to Cedric’s smooth skin. “Sometime, we should go on holiday together to a city. And you can teach me about all the things I don’t know, and we can eat food in diners instead of it being cooked for us by a chef, and I can pretend to be normal.”

“I don’t know,” says George. “You wouldn’t be you that way.” His eyes catch Cedric’s guitar in the corner and he sits up, fetching it with a degree of care as if it were a priceless sculpture. “Play me what you wrote me.”

“I didn’t finish anything,” Cedric protests, but George leans forward, insistent.

“I’ll take snippets and bits and pieces. I want to hear.”

Cedric glances at George for a moment, and then back to his guitar, fingers drumming against the fretboard; he reaches out his leg and shoves George so that he rolls over, flopping down with his back to the bed and his eyes to the patterns on the ceiling, the balls of his feet grazing the floorboards. He shifts so that he’s resting against Cedric’s waist and shuts his eyes, feeling Cedric move as he plays, tripping over finger-plucked chords in jazz styles and taking a short twist through a walking bassline, and he moves with all that flamboyance, too, as if he’s one with the music, just as jovial and playful as George himself, taking a short moment to run through the riff from  _ Heroes _ almost as if it’s a little joke for him.

“Well?” Cedric asks.

“It sounds like being nineteen,” George says, glancing up and at Cedric, grinning as he extends his hand up to caress Cedric’s cheek, warm with blushing. “I think it’s better than being sixteen.”

* * *

George’s cassettes come out of the bottom of his bag and circulate through Cedric’s life: they listen to Talking Heads’  _ Speaking in Tongues _ on a ride into town to buy a new book that’s out, and David Bowie’s  _ Let’s Dance _ out by the pool, and The Clash’s  _ Combat Rock _ on a boombox when they’re wading through the river, fighting the current to splash each other. George keeps them catalogued in his journal, pages sticky with glued-in train tickets and this and that sellotaped between the pages, pencilled in next to the front cover of a magazine showing the French countryside - and yet somehow the picture can’t even match the reality, not now he’s here.

The weeks disappear in this way, between Cedric and his work and Fred teasing him over breakfast, and August creeps up on George unexpectedly, the sun strengthening and glazing red burns over his shoulders. Cedric keeps playing guitar, toying and working at his composition, writing it down in scribbles on paper, scoring in his own bar lines and making a mess of the whole thing, but a mess as determined as his love for George. 

The tape that finally seals its place as George’s sound of nineteen is, eventually,  _ Combat Rock _ . It’s what’s in the boombox when he’s sitting in Cedric’s bedroom, cooling off from the heat of the day outside, his shirt off and flung over the bedpost; and Cedric puts his hand on the small of George’s back, and they stay that way for a long time before George sits up and turns around, wrapping his legs around Cedric. 

“This is stupid,” he says, “but you know you can’t take this back, right?”

“Why would I ever want to take it back?”

George bites down his smile, and kisses Cedric like there’s never been anything more important in his world, and never will be again.

* * *

George doesn’t do goodbyes. He sneaks out of Cedric’s bed a week later before the dawn even breaks to pack his things, and him and Fred take the early train out of town, amid dozing locals on their way to work.

“What tape did you leave him?” Fred asks. George doesn’t ask how Fred knows; they’re twins, after all, so most of the time they just  _ do _ . “Did you go all out? Did you leave him  _ Heroes _ ?”

“Nah,” George says. “No-one’s getting that off me. That’s  _ mine _ . I gave him  _ Combat Rock _ . It means more, anyway.” 

“Christ, you like him, don’t you? Never thought I’d see the day you voluntarily gave up one of your favourite tapes.” Fred pats George’s knee, covered now by a pair of turn-up jeans that are inappropriate for the weather. “You should go back.”

“I can’t. We’ve got another job, and he’ll be leaving soon, too.” George swallows. 

“We’ve got nothing over Christmas, though, do we, George?”

His eyes light up. 

“No, we don’t, Fred. But I think I have just the idea…” 

* * *

George was never a wall of silence; he called Cedric like clockwork every Saturday night. But George on the phone isn’t George in person; Cedric misses his fidgeting, his freckles, the way he’d sneak kisses, misses playing him new snippets of his song.

George turns up at the start of December like a present in himself, and Cedric can’t help at first but just stare back as if George has walked straight out of his fantasies. His hair is longer and curling round his ears and Cedric wants to know if his mouth is still alcoholic with the taste of gin or mimosa, but he fumbles over his words and instead just looks. 

George, too, is no prophet; he’s come up with at least five killer lines, ten sharp lines, and twenty  _ it-doesn’t-matter-because-it’s-Cedric  _ lines, but they leave his head as soon as their eyes meet, and he laughs. 

“Do you want to get drunk on Eggnog?” he asks. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this fic! I enjoyed writing it. I wrote it just after watching Call Me By Your Name, so it's probably quite similar as I was really inspired by it - and you can probably tell that I'm about ready for summer to start.


End file.
